


pith

by krebkrebkreb



Series: foreign recollections [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: 5.0-5.3 spoilers, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amaurot (Final Fantasy XIV), Amaurotine Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), CW: mention of vomit, Lalafell Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Light to Moderate Angst, Lowercase, Multi, Named Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), author uses capitalization only for Emphasis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:20:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27253339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krebkrebkreb/pseuds/krebkrebkreb
Summary: the dying gasp goes rather differently.“no,” he says, lurching involuntarily forward as if to touch, to confirm, to—“it can’t be...”the being in front of him shifts, straightens her back. no longer this diminutive mortal husk, she towers over him even from this distance and he feels he can see her very soul. what’s more, he can feel the achingly familiar call of it, careening up from the half-remembered depths of eternity.
Relationships: Ardbert/Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Minor or Background Relationship(s), Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch/Warrior of Light
Series: foreign recollections [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1989904
Kudos: 24





	pith

**Author's Note:**

> _(or: a greek tragedy except azem is roman)_   
>  _(or: let’s cry about ascians & identity)_

・✰・

> Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were  
>  behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.  
>  For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter  
>  that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive.

_from rainer maria rilke “sonnets to orpheus, XIII” (1923)  
translated stephen mitchell (1989) _

・✰・  
  


emet-selch— _hades_ —stands upon the literal edge of nothing, the edge of _everything_ , this precipice he has created to immortalize this bleakest moment of the end of days. below this platform is naught but ruin and at his feet lie his unconscious and defeated foes, the only people with whom he has shared any bit of _his_ side of the story. the only people he has ever thought might truly _understand_. who perhaps could have been wise enough, stupidly self-sacrificing enough to know that the rejoining is inevitable and they should just help. 

the warrior— _of light, of darkness, of ala mhigo, of ishgard, eikon slayer and all those other long winded titles_ —lies crumpled and dying among them. useless. so much promise brought to nothing more than a pitiful _mortal_ end, curled up in her own aether-soaked vomit as she succumbs to the light.

he would weep in disgust if only he had the energy.

it’s this revulsion, this inability to look away from such a disaster, that has him peeking through his fingers and squinting against the light to watch what he is now certain will be a gruesome end to something formerly merely hollow and sad.  
if he weren’t watching, he would have missed the moment her body shudders, draws a full breath. _stands up._

she speaks to him with a deep voice, a voice not her own, and then—  
then she grows taller, taller, an impossibly tall form for the tiny little hero.  
is she. is that. no. impossible. does he really see…?  
_no_. 

he sees before him a different form of her: the True Form of her, clothed in the robes of amaurot, the robes of their past, and everything he was sure he was going to make happen suddenly seems utterly impossible. taking the place of that certainty is a cavernous ache, a horrible feeling that hits with all the grace and gentleness of the sea rising to reclaim a city: devastation incarnate. ruin.

“no,” he says, lurching involuntarily forward as if to touch, to confirm, to—“it can’t be...”

the being in front of him shifts, straightens their back. no longer this diminutive mortal husk, she towers over him even from this distance and he feels can see her very _soul_. what’s more, he can feel the achingly familiar call of it, careening up from the half-remembered depths of eternity.

azem.  
though.... as she is like this, cloaked in grey but without the red mask of the convocation, would she willingly be known as such?

he wants to call this a trick—both of the light and of the aether it is made of—but for just the space of one inhale, he allows himself to consciously acknowledge the similarities he had been so willing to brush aside as _coincidence_. there are so many of them, spanning all the way from the stubborn passion for saving every being to the patently ridiculous globetrotting. it fits a pattern of the ages, one elidibus would have noticed as well were he of his right mind. were he as capable of Unsundered Recollection as emet-selch himself was, as lahabrea had been.

 _azem_ has destroyed lahabrea. that too feels troublingly fitting. azem had been one to summon hydaelyn; of course a fragment of the mother of mothers would end one of zodiark’s first with her own might.

oh what a _curse_. how disastrous for him, for them, for zodiark’s grand plan: now that he has let himself recognize the connection it will be more than unbearable to let so, so much of this precious soul disperse into the lifestream.

“i don’t know how you’ve done this,” he begins, taking two steps towards the towering figure to bask in her presence as much as to demand—but then during the span of the second she is small again. even while standing her eye line barely meets his thigh, and he wants to throw up. to scream. to lash out bodily and kick her off this horrible little spit of land he has created just for her because how _dare she_. how dare she be a pathetic little thing again when he had just been granted a glimpse at the truth of her soul’s glory.

he watches it happen—is stuck watching, why always _watching—_ as she doubles over and immediately wonders, despite his wild homicidal urges: is this already the end?

is he being punished for a lack of devotion to his cause, for wallowing in personal anguish and memories and longing for days unattainable? is this glimpse at her as she Had Been, this thickening of her soul and his firsthand look at somehow Remembering before watching it dissipate and fade again as she _dies_ , not probably _exactly_ what he deserves for daring to think these shattered, sundered mortals might have real _potential_?

light flashes from her skin, white cracks splitting down it like veins in marble. she lurches, vomits a sickly white onto the stone once more.

then she bends forward, grabs her head—no, no, no no no.   
no, he recognizes this; he should have immediately known. she is not Dying, not just now, not just yet: she is further Remembering. remembering consciously with that cursed gift, and oh echo is to be a worse punishment for him than her death would be. 

several agonizing seconds pass before the light fades and only distantly does he recognize that his mind is in freefall as he watches her, that these careening, spinning, rapid-fire emotions barely seem his own. is it possible for the ageless to still experience a shock?

their eyes meet. a silent breath at the edge of the end of everything.  
then.  
her confused, exhausted voice calls to him:  
“hades?”

“proserpina,” he finds himself answering in a whisper, the name tugging itself out from his throat and lips involuntarily. he is realizing now, as he sees that very same blue of her soul matched in the color of her eyes—he is fucked. this is a disaster of such magnitude that has perhaps only occurred to him once or twice before; and always to do with her.

the gift from her hydaelyn has brought him back a bit of his—of something so dear to him he dare not put a word to it. damn that crystal; damn them both.

their gazes remain locked for an impossibly long, stretched-out moment before there is a noise behind him. the shuffle of feet, the scrape of metal on rough ground. the ominous ringing noise of a hollow tap: the sound of a staff hades should have thrown to the void along with its owner.

“stand down,” the voice of the crystal exarch tries to command. a pathetic sound, weary and weak. 

“i am surprised that _you_ can stand at all.” he turns just his head to look, sees the man leaning on his silly fancified golden cane. so perhaps not so ominous a sound after all. 

“i could not well leave matters half finished,” wheezes the allagan whelp. absurd. what finishing is he about or even _able_ to do? die?

“no,” hades drawls. he is annoyed as much as anything else by this sad display, this… this unproductive bump in the road, a waste of his suddenly so precious time. “no, i suppose you could not do me that kindness.”

the exarch sputters inelegantly, blinks his red eyes in owlish confusion, leans more heavily on his staff for a moment before pushing himself up. “why should _i_ owe _you_ a kindness, ascian?”

hades looks away from the poor frail thing, back to the tiny, tiny vessel of his proserpina. “you don’t. when i stopped your plan to save her i damned us all.” he points back to the man he’s speaking to without taking his eyes off his beloved—because now that he’s thought of her again like that he can’t unthink it, can’t unwant it. “do you even have the strength to do it? to pull out the Light and let her live?”

“hades,” says the hero—surprisingly steadily, unsurprisingly _sternly_ and so full of disapproval _,_ and he is catapulted back an age, an eon, a fucking sodding blighted _eternity_ to all the times she would say that and look at him like this. even with a different face, it was always like this. 

a hysterical chuckle leaves him. he is breaking; he must be. she will somehow sunder him as her mother sundered the others, except he will never be granted the kindness of Forgetting. “you won’t let him.” it isn’t even a question. he knows her.  
he has _known_ her this whole time, hasn’t he?

“i would never,” she confirms. aether cracks through her skin, more sharp white lines forming elegant cobwebs. the contrast is horrible, beautiful. what she will become is also horrible, beautiful.

“this shard is doomed.” he won’t, _can’t_ let her ignore that fact. if she fails to contain this aether then she becomes a sin eater— _the_ sin eater. a spectacularly powerful sin eater, because it is the product of his scheming, his planning, and his plans are always flawless except when they’re not. 

surely she sees the good in sacrificing just one of these people for the whole of her, when it means also forestalling the rest of their collective doom. surely he can make her see! he tries to tell himself that if he sounds more desperate than he does convincing, it is only a different tactic persuade. that if his mind is spinning, it is only because he is so very clever.

“you can’t know that,” she professes. the idiot. “i am but one mortal. more of us will come to defend this half-existence you abhor so much.” her little brown face shines with pain and pride as she talks about her fellows; how absolutely certain she sounds makes him sick. is he supposed to just watch her throw everything away, just let her be so sure that these people so much _lesser_ than her can fix anything?

“no! no, _proserpina_ ,” and here he spits the name like a venom he must be rid of, like a poisonous thing, like an idea he can infect her with, “we both now know you are nothing like merely one mortal–“

he stops mid sentence, mid thought. freezes bodily, staring at her. staring _into_ her. 

she _is_ nothing like _one_ mortal.  
there is something more to her, a space now somehow wider than all the aether tearing at her seams.  
like a container that has been carved out deeper to hold all it must. a further well of space within.  
a bluer soul he doesn’t want to let go.

there is a tipping, a precipice; the hollow edge of the rest of eternity spans out in front of him. the promise of things he thought he never again would have tempts him beyond rationality and reason.

this agent of his salvation stands before him, barely three fulms high in boots.

“whose voice was that?” he asks, mind already spinning together the threads of what may have happened. 

・✰・

how long ago did she last sleep? fatigue claws at her, rending deep into her flesh like the cracks of aether, and she feels _weary_. 

a lifetime ago, she had felt like everything was at its end. the ghimlyt dark was a terrifying ordeal, her friends falling around her and the fate of not just ala mhigo but all aldenard at risk should the army pierce their defense. her home of eorzea had been again, as always, hers to defend. 

but this was once her home too. this now-conjured city of amaurot, full with memories of ghosts and devastation. that had been the real end: the rain of fire and the impatient, relentless unwinding of reality that came in its wake. no end could be more complete than the undoing of everything. every other doom she has experienced, even the Calamity she had lived through, pales before this. 

it’s nearly too much.

she was once proserpina. proserpina, an amaurotine woman who came of age in an ageless time with hades and hythlodaeus and gaia and so many others so dear to her. proserpina, who joined the convocation as azem, who did what she felt was right always—even in the face of the yawning terror of the End.

but this woman she is now, mikh, still remembers so very little. little enough that it may as well just be like a dream. a conscious lifetime realized in the flash of a light.

though—  
perhaps not as fast as this echo or as fleeting as a dream, equally distant is her own life before entering this fight. mimiko miko is as much a stranger to mikh as azem is, the streets of pre-occupation ala mhigo are harder to recall than amaurot. she had lived there, been born there, but something—she still knows not exactly what and does not wish to—about the trauma of the calamity had been so great that her mind had not worked to remember or retain very much until her first time experiencing the echo. even the first name she was given had needed to be rediscovered. mimiko and mikh are one and the same, yet they are _not_.

hades… _emet-selch_ knows likely none of this about her. what he does know was either learned dishonestly or is a clever guess.   
he does not _know_ her.

but he knew Her.  
and he’s looking at her now like she’s hung the moon in the sky. like she placed the stars up there just to help guide him to her—and for all she knows after how brief, how incomplete the echo always is, maybe she _did_. 

proserpina who became azem may very well have placed a map for him in the very heavens, a Creation to guide herself home or him to meet her. inside her are the thoughts and feelings and hopes of a woman who mikh knows beyond Knowing would do either. such was the depth of proserpina’s love.

in her too somewhere are the thoughts and feelings and hopes of _ardbert_ —though the things that make ardbert ardbert and the things that make her herself are not Entirely Distinguishable anymore. they are simultaneously each both themselves and each other. his blurry century of invisible sorrow, her short life of brutal struggle. their wonder and horror and that feeling you get when a puzzle piece slips into place where you didn’t think it would go—it’s shared now, but it’s also one. 

one ocean of love for him, for her, for what they’ve done, for this impossible thing they _are_. 

it overwhelms. it’s beautiful, bright, _blinding_. it hurts. it’s perfect.

her feelings for emet-selch—for the triality of identities wrapping that soul that calls to hers—are far more complicated than even that. like the glimpses at her childhood fighting in ala mhigo had given her, this is something foreign yet so familiar. everything about this fits into her own past, her own mind, her own understanding of herself in an unprecedented way. when she had fallen into aymeric’s arms that day in gridania during the dragonsong war and tearfully, perplexedly declared that she felt she was smaller than she ought to be, something like this hadn’t been what she thought she meant. and yet.

 _yet_.

here she stands. tiny and yet Remembering a time she stood many fulms higher. and in that time...

she had loved hades once, so very deeply. she knows she had. or… part of her had? more than parts. azem, proserpina, the sum of more parts of her and more parts of ardbert than she can figure out and more than she thought she was even made of. she knows she once loved him just as surely as she knows he must love her—or parts of her, or the promise of those parts—even after more time has passed since they’re parting than her mind can comprehend.

if he did not still love something about her, if she weren’t somehow tempting him with more than he can get out of furthering this rejoining by merely daring to continue living, she feels he would be gloating over her path of destruction as a sin eater. 

what will happen, she wonders, when she _does_ die? she would be a fool to believe he has put aside zodiark’s plans for a rejoining just as he would be a fool to think Remembering has lessened her own resolve to save this world. something has changed between them, but nothing in their dynamic has changed at all. 

“whose voice was that?” emet-selch asks, as though he hadn’t just stopped mid-beratement to stare at her long enough for her thoughts to spiral past what he was saying and into… all of _this._

she scrunches her nose, confused. “i speak with mine own voice.” and she does so more steadily than she had dared hope.

“she steals no bodies, unlike some.” the voice of the exarch startles her. she glances over to see him leaving heavy on his staff and glaring daggers into the back of hades’ head. 

“you may have been unconscious, but i was not. she was fully Herself, soul practically _ablaze_ , and yet she spoke with a man’s voice—now _whose_?”

mikh gasps quietly.  
oh.  
_Oh._

it stands to reason—probably, _hopefully_ —that some aether would certainly be expended to facilitate the Joining that must have happened in that endless white space. is that how she’s on her feet now?

she has read more than her fair share of aetherology and the idea, once it occurs to her, is almost disgustingly obvious: returning ardbert to his own physical self may be a way to burn up the rest. 

“my voice was mine own,” she repeats to him, wondering if he has realized the same. “a part of myself returned to me.”

his voice, usually so acerbic and superior, travels to her across the space between them on a note of wonder: “only you, hero.” the word could almost be mistaken for praise.

when he takes two steps towards her it’s as though the world is at an angle altogether unfamiliar to him, his gait unsteady and his feet barely leaving the ground. “permit me…” he asks, hand outstretched. in the hesitant, guilty-sounding tone of his voice lies the rest of his question and she takes a half step back in hesitance.

“hades,” she admonishes, the name coming to her lips yet again far too naturally. she _meant_ to call him emet-selch. she _did_. 

“please.” his voice carries the weight of longing, of loss and confusion and hope, and in the creases of his face she can see it, this _strain_ he is feeling. she doesn’t feel the least bit guilty for causing it; he deserves as much and more, after everything he has done.

but the part of her that remembers proserpina, the part of her that again _is_ proserpina…

she _loved_ him once. he loves her. now he is here, and she is here, and inside her grows something like a spark of hope that his obvious devotion can— _maybe_ —be turned to good.

she knows not to ask him to save this world. she knows not to ask him for a grand gesture, not to ask for anything that might go against his own self-admitted tempering. but his own selfishness… _that_ she can confidently demand of him. and from that she can find a way to save everything else.

so she says, “promise to fix what you have done.”  
and he says, “i shall.”

the embrace solidifies her hope into something bright, glowing, blazing—  
or perhaps that is just her, quite literally. they have work to do.

**Author's Note:**

> lowercase involves so much fighting of autocorrect but the ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ...
> 
> Thank you for reading! I hope you liked it. I have been working on this for about a month, maybe longer? It's the eighteenth total fic I've written about Mikh but the first to make it to AO3 because I have been nervous to write publicly about my precious potato. Maybe someday the rest of her ever-evolving tale will find its way up here too. They use... significantly more proper capitalization and paragraphs than this moody little piece. Mostly.
> 
> You can find me as @krebshouting on twitter.


End file.
